A Little Game with You
by SlowQuotesQuill
Summary: AU. "Evidently, he was watching me as closely as I was watching him. So our psychological war has started already, then?" Instead of joining the Teikou basketball club, Akashi and Midorima join the shogi club. Aka/Midori.
1. But Maybe You're Different

**A Little Game with You**

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><p><em>Such a disfigured love will only<br>__Go down very briefly in history, nothing longer than a flash  
><em>_No wound is inflicted just for the sake of licking them afterwards  
><em>_One's pride will easily be the other's joke_

—**KINGS**, angela (trans.)

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><p><strong>1<strong>: _But Maybe You're Different_

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><p>I was twenty-six then, watching the morning news and waiting for my everyday Oha Asa horoscope, when the mention of the most prestigious national shogi tournament for high school students was announced as a brief news item. I had associated many pleasant memories with that game during my middle school days—which was really quite a long time ago, now. Almost thirteen years have passed ever since I first entered the hallowed halls of the prestigious Teikou Middle School. Even now, when I was already out of compulsory school and studying medicine in a college in Tokyo, I still keep one set of the pristine, light-colored uniform that had marked me out as a Teikou student, deep in the farthest corner of my closet.<p>

Well, it was not that everything I associated with shogi was pleasant, on the other hand. Shogi was one of the alarm clocks that awakened me to the reality of life—that however good I may get, there would always—_always_—be someone even better than me. And at that point in my musings, I find myself taking out my mobile phone and staring at Akashi Seijuurou's number in my directory, my thumb idling over the call key before I flip the phone closed once more and toss it on my black school coat, slung over a chair.

I never really call Akashi Seijuurou on my phone, even when the urge gets strong whenever someone mentions shogi within my earshot. After all, ever since we parted ways on our graduation ceremony from middle school, dressed in our pale uniforms, with rosettes pinned on our chests, we had made an agreement that said never to contact each other unless necessary. And in Akashi's vocabulary, a morning call made to catch up for old times' sake was not what he'd call a necessity.

Akashi had always been unsentimental like that, although somehow, that was his subtle way of telling me to not contact him until we've both reached what we wanted to reach. He was a study of opposites, a man both playful and oh-so-terrifying when he wants to be, a boy both childish and too mature when the situation dictates it. But then, rarely does a situation—or anyone or anything for that matter—dictate Akashi's decisions. That was one of his many pet prides in life. Every little thing that happens to him can be broken down into calculations. Nothing is ever not preordained with him.

And so, when I finally go to grab my phone and my coat from the chair to put it on, I realized something very crucial, something that I would have to curse (or bless?) for the rest of my adult life hereafter.

Somehow, during the time when I was thinking of Akashi, I missed the Oha Asa horoscope segment. And missed hearing about my lucky item for today.

Somewhere in the depths of my heart, Akashi Seijuurou still finds time to mess with me however indirectly, even after so much time has been lost.

And so, dreading my unavoidable bad luck for the rest of the day, I step out of the house and immediately immerse myself into a marsh of middle school memories.

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><p>He stood at the height of five feet two, about five months younger and seven inches shorter than I was, when we spent that day in the shogi club room, after the meeting had been over and everyone was filing out of the room noisily. He was one of the more exceptional students who had filed for an application to join Teikou's shogi club, instantly outshining the first-year that had been pitted against him in the casual getting-to-know series of games. Admittedly, I have been impressed by how he seemed to think more than three steps ahead, cornering the other freshman into a dead end even before the game had really started to lengthen.<p>

I was not half-bad at mine as well, although he certainly finished his game at about half the time it took me to win mine. Although, being one of the taller freshmen, a junior had taken it in his head to see if I was any better than the rest of the bunch. In my last school, I had been one of the best shogi players in the entire student body and I had prided myself on that, so I accepted.

Akashi Seijuurou played long before my turn, his smooth and thrifty movements on the board an extraordinary thing of beauty to watch. He made shogi look like an art and a science at the same time, a thing that I wouldn't even hope to accomplish in a hundred years. It was evident that he stood on a different level, and being the hormone-charged teenager that I was back then, I couldn't help but be envious of the redheaded boy with the clear, sharply focused eyes—the eyes of an undefeated winner.

That was why I felt rather surprised when, after everyone has been dismissed, he approached me immediately and without hesitation, his gait confident, as though he was the tallest person in the room. His Teikou uniform, the crisp light blue shirt and the straight tie, all beneath a buttoned white jacket, with slacks as neat as though he had just walked out of his house, suited him perfectly like a military general out to saddle his best horse to war.

"Midorima Shintarou, correct?" Even then, his lack of honorifics in his speech and his extremely informal way of speaking had been characteristic. Akashi had never burdened himself with ornamental words, after all. "You might not have noticed me much, but I recognized you from the classroom."

"We're classmates?" I said stupidly, and then it hit me—he was the guy who boldly volunteered to become the male class representative, the one they called—

"I am Akashi Seijuurou," he supplied with a nod. I had noticed then as well that he introduced himself as though his name was a kind of title, like how one would say "I am a king," or "I am an emperor"—although, I have to admit, his name really was kind of elegant, in a way.

I nodded apprehensively at his introduction, my train of thought somewhere in the line of _He's not going to approach me if he doesn't need something from me_. "I see. What can I help you with, Akashi-san?"

"Please, don't bother with the honorific, I find it awkward since we're of an age," he said with a smile—Akashi can be rather charming when he bothers to make an effort—and looked at me appraisingly. "I saw your match earlier. You were pretty good."

If it had been in my personality to laugh easily, I would have done so at that simple compliment that he paid me, but I was envious of him, and felt that this was simply too much—a guy like him couldn't simply have meant that in the way one usually means it.

Maybe if Akashi hadn't shone brilliantly in that simple game, then maybe we'd have become fast friends right there or then—or not. Akashi has, after all, the disposition of a finicky cat, as I will soon find out.

But I cannot change those even in hindsight, so what I remembered saying next was, "That's something, coming from someone who beat his opponent quite quickly."

"Oh, that one was a total beginner, so I had thrashed him to save myself the trouble of having to endure seeing his sloppy moves." His famously sharp tongue having cut the remnants of the unknown freshman's pride into more pieces, Akashi's smile grew wider as he directed it at me. "But maybe you're different. Your opponent was no slouch, but you managed him pretty well."

"Thank you, then," I said cautiously, my curiosity about this strange student, who was refined and informal at the same time, peaking drastically.

"What if we play one game?" he proposed, idly caressing his tie. "Just one little game."

"Well," I glanced at my watch cursorily, noticing how his crimson eyes seemed to track my every movement. Evidently, he was watching me as closely as I was watching him. So our psychological war has started already, then?

"One game then," I decided, and that time was perhaps the first time I have ever seen him truly happy.

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><p>Now that I was thinking over that first meeting with him, I find myself wondering more about the enigma that had surrounded his character, the colors that he had worn before they finally faded into oblivion, the sharpness of his speech that had weathered down into a gentle, or almost gentle, point. I had never attempted to contact Akashi Seijuurou ever since the graduation ceremony, as I have said, and as I sit in a lecture about the workings of the cardiovascular system, I wonder, instead of listen to my professor's droning voice, about the young boy I had met in the reddening shogi club room and the young man that I had left in the empty grounds of Teikou Middle School.<p>

_What does he look like now?_ I mused. _Did he become a professional shogi player, like what he had told me he'd become?_

And then, as if on cue, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Against my better judgment, I slipped it out and flipped it open to see the screen.

For the first time in thirteen years, Akashi Seijuurou was calling me.


	2. Already in Check

**A Little Game with You**

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><p><em>It's a game of life where you're thrown away once he's bored<br>__Everything is at the mercy of God's whim  
><em>_Yet humans don't know that and blame everything on fate  
><em>_Funny story, isn't it?_

—**Game of Life**, Hatsune Miku (trans.)

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><p><strong>2<strong>: _Already In Check_

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><p>When I was still a thirteen-year-old freshman in middle school, I had been somewhat of a stand-offish character—the one that was always given weird looks in the hallways, the one that everyone wants to bully but not quite following through with it because of one reason: I was no fun at all. Not even fun enough for the resident delinquents to even bother registering in their lists.<p>

However, it seemed as though Akashi Seijuurou never thought of me like that at all. He liked to frequently challenge me in shogi games after that first game that we've played in the burning-red of the shogi club room, even when I have never won against him once. When I asked him about that, since he usually liked to defeat an opponent once and move on to the next (I have witnessed him do something like that one club meeting after school, which immediately convinced the other members in our year level to regard Akashi as some sort of genius, which he neither acknowledged nor denied, as though their whisperings were offerings that should have been given a long time ago), he answered me with something that was a cross between a chuckle and an honest laugh.

"Why, Shintarou," he had said with a wicked look in his red eyes (he had progressed to calling me by my first name after just a week of hanging out together, an outrageous record in the least, and I wasn't quite convinced when he explained that he called people he respected with their first names, as he had a certain glint in his eye when he was telling me that), "I would have thought that such a lonely guy like you would appreciate my hanging around you, you know. Without me, you're practically alone."

He had a habit of being mercilessly blunt, this Akashi Seijuurou, and yet, when his painful straightforwardness was directed at me, I simply brush it off as though I had been used to it all my life, as opposed to having only having been exposed to it for a solid month.

"In which case I would have benefited more in the long run," I countered, moving my next piece on the board. "And you didn't really answer my question, did you?"

Also, for some reason, Akashi received negative remarks from me more pleasantly than when he receives them from another person. Like what he did now, when I remarked that it might have been better had I not met him. If someone else had told him that, he would have either sought to prove that the other was right by shutting him up permanently (the method I leave for you to imagine), or by giving him a superior look that screamed of _What right did I give you to speak like that to me?_, which would have been equally effective, as he had a particularly singular withering look when irritated. "Hm, I would say so," he chose to reply, and immediately slid his knight forward. Looking at the board, I suddenly realized that I was caught in his trap. He surveyed the board after giving check, and then leaned forward.

"Maybe it's because the way you deal with me differs every time we play," he purred, looking extremely pleased (with himself or with something that I hadn't comprehended, I couldn't say), and sat back again in his chair, his right arm naturally placed upon his raised right knee again. "It's as if you're learning more and more how to deal with my favorite traps."

"But not learning fast enough," I grumbled, resignedly giving up the game as he had stripped me of all of my legal escape routes. "You're becoming harder to deal with as well every passing day."

He cleaned up after our game, and then only looked at me when he had placed the board under his desk. "Then that only makes it all the more interesting, yes?" He finished me with a smirk. "Perhaps, one day, without warning, you'll find that you're already in check without doing anything. Perhaps," he said, and his smile was brilliant, "I would also be the one who gave you that check."

When he had taken his things from the desk and left the room, I realized that he had just given me my first warning.

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><p>Man proposes, God disposes.<p>

If in some way, back in middle school, Akashi was somehow God in human flesh, then this pet saying of mine oddly fit. After all, whenever I propose something, he immediately disposes of it—which was not always in a favorable light, though.

The legend of Akashi Seijuurou, known as the undefeated freshman of the shogi club, all-around genius of year 1, and the fearsome, meticulous class representative of class A, quickly spread like fire on dry leaves as the second month of our first year in Teikou drew to a close. He was virtually undefeated in every subject—I always ran second in the class standings, as I had to work hard to keep my scholarship, but all in all, I have never really come close to what he can achieve with a burst of his intellectual prowess.

So far, I respected him for it, but the little cuts that my pride accumulated over the days mounted, and I never did forget the fact that he regarded me more as an amusement than as a friend. He could have passed for a supercomputer of some kind, his analytical skills being much higher than those of his age bracket and even those much older than him, he could run ten straight laps around the track without missing a beat, and he was so terribly good at reading people. I daresay, the moment Akashi Seijuurou decided to become a professional shogi player, the sciences lost the contributions that only a theorist like Akashi could have thought of, the arts lost the beauty that only an artist of Akashi's caliber can offer, and everything in between missed the glimpses of genius that occasionally shone through his physical eyes.

Yes, he might have been a supercomputer; really, I might have considered classifying him as a machine, if not for a few traits which made him decidedly human. His occasional sadistic streaks; his few frustrations in life that so bugged him; his quiet anger when his long patience was stretched to the limit (aforementioned patience having only been extended to me and to his admirers at the shogi club… beware, outsiders)—ah, Akashi Seijuurou was still a very human teenager, whether he liked the arrangement or not.

His excellence at shogi earned him the moderator's approval to secure a slot for the club presidency. Not surprisingly, given Akashi's entirely intimidating aura and the undeniable fact that he was the best player of us all, no one contested the decision—and cornering me after meeting one day, which occurrence was getting common, he told me with a discreet tone that he would like to appoint me as vice president (but of course, he said that with a far more casual tone than I could have conveyed by using this filtered style of speaking).

"Already abusing your power even before rising to the position, Akashi?" I had told him with a sigh. "Nothing less than I would have expected, but… I don't think I—"

"What use is the recommendation for my future presidency," he then countered sharply, "if I can't plan for what I intend to do once I actually get the position?"

Perhaps, when his voice had risen dramatically then; perhaps, when his eyes had narrowed, and his pupils had thinned into slits; perhaps, when he bared his teeth at me in unmistakable signs of challenge, Akashi Seijuurou was telling me that he had already sensed that I was trying to oppose his decisions by refusing his direct command… that he will not accept a "no" for an answer. No, indeed—he didn't need any answer from me at all. What I just had to do was obey his orders.

"Shintarou, you _will_ become my vice president after this year," Akashi then reiterated, apparently calming down when he sensed that I had yielded up to him, as I so often do lately, "That would be all."

Man proposes, God disposes.

And funnily enough, remembering that saying during that instant was what finally convinced me to shut up and leave the decisions to the proud redhead who had turned away from me, walking with smooth, confident steps, like he usually did.

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><p>I don't know what possessed me to write something like this in this period of time, but I should say that even if Akashi's mannerisms were all perfectly preserved in my memory, even if all of his good and bad points had made some mark or another in an impressionable part of my brain, his physical shell was being slowly stripped away in my recollections, leaving nothing of the young, human Akashi behind. Maybe I was writing these memories of him to attempt to recreate an image of what he had looked like. There were a few unforgettable physical characteristics of his, of course, like his short stature, his fiery hair and eyes, and his white, painfully neat Teikou uniform, but when I put them all together, what I get is something more like a shadow of the Akashi that I wanted to remember, rather than a facsimile of what he really used to be. After all, I can never trust my imagination—were Akashi's eyes really as red as I can picture them in my mind? And can he really have been in nothing else than that memorable Teikou uniform?<p>

That was how my mind ran as I sit in the café where we agreed to meet, the smell of brewing coffee and the quiet, hushed music playing off the speakers around the store the only other things that I notice aside from the book that I was reading. The small print, however, seemed to melt into an indecipherable mess when I become aware of the tinkling sound of the bell as the door opened, the footsteps, with the evenly-spaced intervals, that brought to mind the sight of a familiar, confident gait.

I casually glance at my watch—almost time.

"Shintarou."

I look up deliberately from the textbook and looked into Akashi Seijuurou's familiar-yet-unfamiliar face, and felt a rush of something that I cannot really identify. Was this really—?

"You look quite surprised." He sat opposite me across the circular table, and did not even turn his eyes at the menu that the waitress brought before ordering a cup of black tea. Evidently, he was a regular here.

"Well…" I close the book and take another look at him, noticing discrepancies between the past and the present. "Akashi, I don't think that's something that you should comment on about after getting out of touch for thirteen _years_."

"You never change, Shintarou." Akashi straightens his black tie (the familiar gesture oddly dear in my eyes) and looks me in the eye. His hair was shorter than when I last met him—his bangs were cropped carelessly, exposing his forehead, while his eyes were shapelier than ever. Looking into their frank haughtiness, I can see flecks of gold running among red in his right eye—or was that only in my imagination?

"And you've changed so much, Akashi." I sip at my coffee, which had cooled down considerably by now, but kept my eyes trained on this red apparition. "What did you want after all these years? I thought we swore to never contact each other—"

"Yes, unless one of two conditions was met," he said with a tinge of irritability at my implications that he, of all people, would forget something. "Our first condition was we're allowed to contact each other when we have already achieved what we wanted to achieve in life." He stared into my eyes. "And the second condition would be…"

"Ah."

How could I have forgotten? But then, if Akashi Seijuurou truly was here, then—

"I can call you just in case when I needed you badly."

I must have been deaf when I agreed to that arrangement—or maybe not at all. I had been in my proper bearings during that day, but when he put the two conditions forward, I couldn't help but agree.

He was right, then, after all these years… I fell in his cleverly weaved trap, and now I was in check—a check given by the slender young man smiling so knowingly into my eyes right at this very moment. He was God, and I was only human.

I cleared my throat. "So… why did you call, Akashi?"

His gaze never wavered.

"Play with me once more, Shintarou."

It was not a request.


End file.
